(Bad Laasphe 1928–2014 Berlin)
“St. Elmo’s Flower”, 1972, titled, signed and dated O Piene 72, gouache, pigments and fire on cardboards (three layers), 143 x 93 cm, framed

Provenance:
European Private Collection - directly from the artist

The notion of a radical new beginning, setting out for unknown artistic, technological, and spiritual shores, are motifs that characterized Piene’s work for nearly six decades. Piene is of course synonymous with ZERO, the legendary artists’ group he founded in Düsseldorf in 1958 together with Heinz Mack, joined later by Günther Uecker. ZERO stands for the “0” of rocket launch countdowns, the “zero hour” for postwar Germany, reaching for the stars.

“For the generation of Dubuffet and Tàpies, for the entire generation preceding us, the war and the soil were the defining experience: soil, matter, sand, mud,” said Piene in a 1961 interview with the art critic Wieland Schmied.

“That meant taking refuge in a hole in the ground, in trenches, in dugouts, a final shelter from the horrible threats of war.” Piene—who was born in 1928, drafted into the military as a 16-year-old, and taken prisoner before studying art in Munich and Düsseldorf until 1953—was not traumatized in this way. In a very short time, he and the ZERO artists formed an international network, to which Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Jean Tinguely also belonged. Piene set his sights very high: “Our defining experience was living an age when people dreamt of astronomic and cosmonautic adventures, in which they were capable of leaving Earth, of overcoming gravity. We are interested in light, in fire, in airstreams, in the unlimited possibilities for creating a better, more perfect world …” (…)

As a reaction to the psychologically charged style of Tachism and Informel, Piene developed an entirely new technique. For him, the paintings of the “old world” are like suits of armor with “heavy frames” that the viewer is “forced into.” He wants his painting to be free of such obstacles, “the burden of the past, the blisters of the psyche.”
The old, for Piene, is the dark: “I pierce it with light, I make it transparent, I take its terror from it, I turn it into a volume of power with the breath of my life like my own body, and I take smoke so it can fly.” The “grid pictures” and “smoke drawings” he has made since 1959 are dizzying and shimmering, vibrating with energy. They are executed mechanically: no brushstroke touches the canvas, but rather paint or smoke streams through cardboard or metal stencil sieves perforated by hand. The constellations created in this way recall images from space, atoms, and stars, as well as computer punch cards.
For Piene, the painting becomes “an oscillation field for the appearance of pure energy and thus, finally, to the confirmation of the living.” From his “smoke drawings,” he soon developed “fire paintings” for which he burned pigment on the canvas. The bubbles and crusts that form give the circular compositions a strange depth, an alchemistic quality.
(from: Deutsche Bank-ArtMag-82)